Learn more about the digital tools your child may be using to learn. Parents are 21st Century learners, too!

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Pinterest is a way to digitize image collecting, a non-digital activity that lots of us have been doing for years. In a sense Pinterest offers a way to bookmark with images instead of text.

Visit Pinterest.

Many people spend time looking through magazines and catalogs, identifying images such as the best looking clothes, interesting plants, comfortable shoes, or pictures with ideas for an upcoming home construction project. An individual cuts out (or tears out) the image and puts it into a folder. I used to have folders (and more folders) filled with images on all sorts of topics, waiting for me to consult. And I used them from time-to-time.

Pinterest, a social media sharing site, changes everything in this process because it allows users to collect and store digitized images, along with their links, from all over the web, and it offers a way organize the pictures into digital folders, what Pinterest calls boards. When a person searches for and finds a useful image, it’s pinned along with its web link into a board’s collection. An individual can also discover, collect, and pin web images from outside of Pinterest.

Do you ever wish you could amaze the digital kids in your life with statistics or fun facts about the connected world? Would you like to explain a few things – in simple terms – about the extreme size of the connected world? Well, now you can.

If you enjoy talking about really big numbers, take a few minutes to check out some Internet statistics over at the live stats site. A counter keeps track of the growing number of users, increasing second-by-second. Additional charts depict users year-by-year, beginning in 1993 and continuing to 2014. Several more pie charts group data by country and region.

Another way to describe the Internet is to think about the activities that people do when they go on-line. Royal Pingdon, a company that collects statistics for company websites, posts all sorts of cool facts. One of their blog posts, Internet 2012 in Numbers, shares some numbers that demonstrate the size and scope of the Internet. I haven’t seen the 2013 statistics summary, but 2012 is interesting enough. For instance: Continue reading →

Visit the FOSI site to look at the digital parenting report as well as the results of other research.

I attended the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) 2014 annual conference last week and was captivated by the results of the organization’s new digital parenting research — a national survey conducted by Hart Research Associates — with randomly selected parents of children, ages 6 – 17. The participants’ children needed to be Internet users and have access to technology devices. FOSI commissioned the research to identify digital parenting trends — the challenges, benefits, and potential harm that parents worry about as they observe their 21st Century children using technology of effortlessly. You can read the entire report, and on the same page you can also see the slide presentation that attendees saw during the conference. Continue reading →

I’ve been meaning to share the short piece, Americans Spend Nearly Two Days a Month Using Mobil Apps, that appeared on the Time.com site. Written by Jack Linshi, the October 2014 article points out that we (everyone, not just kids) are increasing our use of mobile apps. The article also notes that ComScore has collected data on the most used apps, clearly illustrating in one graph (April 2014, below) the proportion of time we use on apps and browsers (on a computer or other device). The access to some digital locations is almost entirely by apps. Linshi’s piece also links to the Nielsen cross-platform report.

Class-on-a Blog Mission

This blog is designed for GDS parents, alums, and friends who want to learn more about kids' social media and digital device adventures.

Focused on parent technology education, our "class-on-a-blog" replaces the morning and evening classes that we held in previous school years. No need to come to school for yet another event. Instead the content comes to you as a link in an e-mail message.

Please encourage other GDS community members to sign up for these blog post lessons -- parents, grandparents, guardians -- even aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Followers from outside the community are also most welcome to subscribe.